되돌아온 미학: 지젝(Slavoj Zizek)의 실재계

The Return of Aesthetics: The Real in Slavoj Zizek's Psychoanalysis

Since Plato banished the poet from his Republic, beauty has always returned in different shapes as Aristotle elaborated it in his Poetics. The most distinctive return of beauty would be Freud's psychoanalysis in which he pursued evil as the source of the beautiful. Not only did Freud emphasize the significance of the role of the artist as the supreme concern for sublimating the death drives, but he also regarded the source of aesthetics not as the good and the attractive, but as the return of the castration complex, namely uncanny. Since then, the term uncanny whose meaning is not much different from that of the unconscious, has turned out to be the springboard from which every school of psychoanalysis has created its own unique ideas, as did such prominent figures as Lacan and Zizek. For Lacan, who favored Aristotle's plot in his Poetics more than his morality as presented in his Ethics, the dualism of good and bad is never convincing since human beings are not free from the Pleasure Principle. He goes far beyond Freud's sublimation in formulating subjectivity as Desire --a subject whose lack requires repeatedly objet a, the sublimated object in its fantasy until its death. For him, not only is Freud's uncanny a pattern of aesthetic form but that of life itself. Thus, he posited ethics as on the same level as aesthetics. Now what could Zizek possibly do for his own time for the politics against Post-industrial society without being trapped into Postmodern relativities? The paper shows the slightly different concepts in Lacan's lack and Zizek's surplus enjoyment to track down a reformulation of the Real. Thus, the ultimate purpose of this study is to reveal the two-faced positions of the Real: negativity and the death drives.